Last week I touched ever so briefly on the fact that cotton was far and away America's leading export, all the way up to the 1930s. Well, let's take a little more detailed look at the product, the inventor of the cotton gin, Eli Whitney, and the period leading up to the Civil War.

Until the end of the 18th century, the human race wore miserable clothing. We had garments that were difficult to wash, thus they, and we, were filthy. Cotton was different. It was easy to clean, could be worn next to the skin, and, in warmer climes, it was the primary garment, while in colder countries, it was still worn next to the skin. [You see, "layered" was in long before you probably thought it was.]

But to produce a pound of cotton thread, it took about 12-14 man days. Compare this to other textiles at the time; six for silk, 2-5 for linen, and 1-2 for wool. It was only a matter of time before the clever people, who make life easier for those of us who aren't, came up with some solutions to make cotton more viable.

In the Britain of the late 18th century, a number of inventions were spawned. First you had the Hargreaves spinning jenny (1764), then the Arkwright "water frame" (1769), and Samuel Crompton's spinning mule (1779). Arkwright's invention was a water-powered machine that twisted carded cotton into thread, while the spinning mule did the work of 200 spinners. Whereas in 1765 half a million pounds of cotton had been spun in England, all of it by hand, by 1784 the total was 12 million, all by machine. And in 1785 the Boulton & Watt steam engine was introduced to power these contraptions. Some label this last development the first Big Bang of the Industrial Revolution.

As an aside, it's interesting to note that Britain carefully guarded the secrets of the inventions, forbidding their export or descriptions of them, even preventing the departure of informed mechanics. Compare that to today and our porous borders for all things technical…not that we could have prevented the recent theft of secrets ranging from biotech to nuclear.

The first American cotton bale arrived in Liverpool in 1784. [Which means the Beatles must have contemplated the name "Cottonelles." Well?] With Eli Whitney, however, the industry was totally transformed.

Whitney was born in 1765 on a farm in Massachusetts. The family was poor, as was the case with most clans of the colonial period. Back then you had to pretty much produce what you needed in the way of crude implements, shoes, and clothing, but it was in the little workshops where the spirit of invention often flourished. As a boy, Eli Whitney was no exception, setting up a forge to make nails for his father.

Whitney eventually worked his way through Yale as an engineer. It was after graduation in 1792 that he headed on down to South Carolina where he was taking a job as a tutor. On the way, he decided to visit fellow grad Phineas Miller, overseer of Mulberry Hill near Savannah, Georgia. The plantation was owned by Mrs. Nathaniel Greene, widow of the Revolutionary War hero.

By the mid-1780s in coastal Georgia and South Carolina, a long-fiber "Sea Island cotton" was being grown commercially that could easily be separated from its shiny black seeds by squeezing it through rollers. But this particular kind of cotton had little chance of making it in the soil and climate found elsewhere in the South. The green seed in these other regions clung to the lint so that the rollers crushed it and spoiled the fiber. One person could barely separate a pound by hand over the course of a day.

So with this as background, upon Eli's arrival, Catharine Greene noticed that he had quite an aptitude for all things mechanical and she suggested he devise a mechanism for removing the seed from the cotton. He solved it in 10 days. Historian Paul Johnson relates how Whitney was able to do so.

"Watching a cat claw a chicken and end up with clawfuls of mere feathers, he produced a solid wooden cylinder with headless nails and a grid to keep out the seeds, while the lint was pulled through by spikes, a revolving brush cleaning them. The supreme virtue of this simple but brilliant idea was that the machine was so cheap to make and easy to operate."

Whitney's invention, the "cotton gin" ('gin' being short for engine) was unfortunately "absurdly simple." A simple description was all any skilled worker needed to rip it off and by the time a patent was secured (1794), a number of copies were already in use. [Phineas Miller was a party to the patent as well.] Whitney ended up earning no more than $100,000, mere peanuts, for an invention that would help change the course of history.

And the invention of the cotton gin was not a good thing for those who would become slaves. One working on a plantation using the gadget could produce 50 pounds of cotton a day instead of one.

But Whitney wasn't finished. A driven, Puritan type, he was a lifelong bachelor interested only in his job. Eli lived in a simple farmhouse with a few workshops near New Haven, Connecticut. He always seemed to be short of money and Congress denied his attempt to renew his patent. [It got so bad that during the War of 1812, he directly petitioned President Madison for funds.]

In 1798 he built a firearms factory and it was during this phase that he came up with the "American System," the theory behind mass production. Whitney grasped "that the way to produce machinery or products in vast quantities at low prices was to achieve interchangeability of parts, uniformity, standardization, on a scale never before imagined." [Paul Johnson] Whitney was creating some of the first machine tools.

Interestingly, the British and French scoffed at his ideas because it took away the craftsman's "individuality." But labor costs were so high it was often unfeasible to keep a craftsman on the books. Whitney was looking for a process whereby marginally skilled men could be easily trained, and his work pool ended up being a largely immigrant one. It would take decades before the superior Europeans (ahem) understood that America's labor-saving machinery was far better than anything they had.

Next week we'll take a look at the growth of cotton, post-cotton gin, and the Civil War.

Sources:

"Growth of the American Republic," Morison, Commager, Leuchtenburg
"A Great Civil War," Russell Weigley
"A History of the American People," Paul Johnson
"America: A Narrative History," Tindall and Shi

Brian Trumbore